Wild Horses (22 page)

Krystal swung the Mazda around, pushing the door open from inside, and Boyd fell into the passenger seat. She took off again, while out the window he saw Madeline rushing at them through the wind and dust, howling with fury. Her arm flashed, and something hurtled through the air to thunk against the hood. It bounced back at them, hung on the wipers for a moment, then rolled up the windshield in a shower of pale blue crystals, and was gone.

“Was that what I think it was?” Krystal asked.

“Yeah,” he said, breathless. “Those two back there? They have some really unique uses for it.”

*

All they needed for the moment was a little distance between themselves and the trailer. Krystal careened south on U.S. 93, then pulled into the scenic stop two miles from town. While a picnicking family watched with alarm, they washed away dirt and blood at the outside spigot and plucked the electrician’s tape from him. He drank directly from the faucet’s gush until his stomach sloshed and his head spun, then staggered back to the car.

“Did you know those people back there?” Krystal asked.

“Her I did. She used to be my pit boss at the Ivory Coast. Pit
bull
is more like it.”

“What about him?”

“He was planning on cutting my balls off and putting Drano in my eyes, if that clues you in on his personality.” Boyd began to inspect the purloined wallet, the driver’s license. “Gunther Angelo Manzetti? What kind of name is that?”

“Why would they want to kill you, Boyd? I’m getting the idea you haven’t told me everything that’s going on.”

“No. No, I haven’t,” he sighed. “And one of these days we’ll just have to sit down and get all this hoo-ha sorted out.”

He continued to see what Gunther’s wallet had to offer, found a slip of paper tucked behind the currency. He showed Krystal the note with Allison’s forwarding address in Mississippi. Constance — okay, he recalled hearing that name before. Allie’s … cousin?

“I don’t think she’s getting away from this place as clean as she thinks she is,” he said.

“You mean those people would follow her all that way?”

“For over seven hundred thousand dollars? Wouldn’t you?” He glanced at the note again with fresh insight. “Doug Powell, that butterball! He was holding out on me about her! And half of that damage deposit is mine. How’d
they
end up with this, anyway?” He considered Gunther’s methods of persuasion. “Uh-oh…”

At least he and Krystal were back in business. Warning Allie who was coming might go a long way toward forgiveness — worth, at the very least, the reward of his own property.

CHAPTER 13

At least Madeline waited until he was fully conscious before giving him grief. Gunther ruled out consideration for his feelings right away. Probably just wanted to be sure he didn’t miss any.

“Did it ever cross your mind that maybe you’re not cut out for this line of work after all?” she asked.

“So I had an off day,” he grumbled.

“How hard did that have to be?” Just had to keep twisting the knife, didn’t she? “
You
had the gun,
he
couldn’t move, but
you
let yourself get taken out by the seven of spades. That’s not an off day, Gunther. What that is is a terminal case of the stupids.”

He sat on the trailer’s wrought-iron steps, holding his head in both hands. Madeline had uprighted one of the kitchen chairs to sit beside him and nag. Nobody would be sitting on the other chair again, ever. At least some of those bent legs, Gunther assumed, he was responsible for. Broken glass glittered in the dirt, and past the end of the trailer, the Cadillac canted toward its left front fender, the tire buckled down onto the rim. He’d already gathered up his sport coat, with its pilfered pockets, and realized his wallet was missing, along with that beautiful Glock Model 17.

“How do I look?” he asked.

“If I didn’t know you, I would run the other way.” Then the creases in Maddy’s forehead smoothed out, and she seemed to soften for a moment. “Don’t worry. A little soap and water, maybe some disinfectant, I’m sure it’ll clean up better than it looks.”

Better than it felt, too, he hoped. He had tried probing with careful fingers, touching cuts and lumps and scrapes in abundance.

“Do you have to squint like that? It looks perverse.”

“I can’t help it, Maddy. My eye hurts like hell. The Drano couldn’t be much worse than this.”

She dragged the chair closer and thumbed up his right eyelid to peer at the damage, pursing her sun-seamed mouth and leaning into his face with smoky breath.

“Is it … oozing? Feels like that card sliced my eyeball open like a grape.”

“Oh, quit whining, you big baby.” Her fingers felt cool and surprisingly soothing. “You’re not going to lose it, but you’ve got a bad scratch on the cornea. We’ll have to get you a gauze bandage to cover it, because for sure we can’t have you going around squinting like this all the time. You look like Popeye.”

Satisfied that he wasn’t going blind, they took stock of the situation. Boyd was secondary now, reserved for when a convenient opportunity arose. For now, Allison was number one — whatever it was she’d taken from Boyd, they could figure it out after they caught up to her. And it wouldn’t be a bad idea to find out what they could on the guy she’d ridden off with. Her new address in Mississippi was gone with Gunther’s wallet, but Madeline remembered the Wainright name, was sure she’d recognize the rest when she saw it in a Yazoo City phone book. At least he’d had smarts enough to keep most of that comic book cash in his luggage.

“What we need to do ASAFP,” Madeline said, “is get that tire changed and get ourselves out of here. There’s not much moving on this end of town, but that doesn’t mean one of these desert rats up the road didn’t call the sheriff.”

Gunther shrugged it off. “Hey, we’re the victims here. Some tumbleweed cop drops by,
we’re
the ones with the shot-out tire. We tell him we came down here to square some things with a couple old friends, and one of them started going aggro on us. Say we think he was hitting the crack pipe all morning. Outback cop like that, he hears crack, he’ll drop a load in his shorts.”

After changing the tire, Gunther slung the dead one into the Cadillac’s trunk, leaving the lug wrench and jack for Madeline to stow as he trudged into the trailer. Breakfast not two hours ago and already he was starving, all this truculence amping up his metabolism. He took a look through the wrecked kitchen, found nothing but famine and disappointment, and finally had to pick up the squashed half-burrito from the floor, brush it off, and decide that, no, it was not beneath him.

Back in the bathroom, he finally saw the ugly truth of what Boyd’s trickery had done. Blood, dirt, and sweat had marbled into a reddish-brown paste caked across his face. He forced open his right eye, a pink mass with a dense red line of broken capillaries just left of center. All in all, he was a frightshow.

He took off his ruined shirt and shook out the worst of the dust, then washed up; was patting himself dry with a damp hand towel that Allison must have left behind when he heard the arrival of another car. Gunther slipped out of the bathroom and down the short hallway, easing along the trailer wall to the living room’s window. He peeked out from its corner.

A white sedan sat outside, a flashbar on its roof and the gold star of the Yavapai County Sheriff’s Department on its door. Not exactly lightning response time, but Gunther had checked the atlas last night and found Yavapai to be a desolate jurisdiction with a huge expanse of ground to cover. Five minutes more and he and Madeline could have been out of here.

She was speaking with a lone deputy, their voices inaudible, but she seemed to be telling quite the vivid tale. She pointed wildly up the road, back toward town; threw both hands in the air, all outrage and victimization. She led the deputy to the Caddy’s trunk to show him the perforated tire. What she
wasn’t
doing was paying one bit of attention to the trailer. Good girl.

From here, the deputy looked young, polite, officious — a kid, really, lean as a whippet, with broomstick posture and dark green aviator sunglasses. He returned to his car to check back in on his radio, waiting for what seemed far too long.

Whatever abruptly pulled his trigger, Gunther couldn’t guess. The deputy rushed from the car with gun drawn and voice raised, and now every word was clear as he shouted for Madeline to hit the ground. The kid dropped beside her, knee in her back as he clapped a pair of cuffs on her wrists, then hauled her up and hustled her toward his cruiser.

Gunther did a quick fade down the hallway, ducking back into the bathroom, seeing what he could improvise with. All told, there had been better times to lose both his Glock and depth perception. He stuck the hand towel in his waistband, then wrenched the towel bar from the flimsy wall. It felt too light in his hand, nothing more than cast aluminum. The lug wrench would have been better.

Gunther made a smooth transition into combat mode, heard the fierce grind of “The Peter Gunn Theme.” He’d just retreated into the stuffy bedroom when he caught the deputy’s first step onto wrought iron, then decided the bedroom was wrong. Conceal himself this far back and the element of chance was gone — the kid would know he was there. Better to move up, keep the boy guessing.

He was in the bathroom again when he heard the deputy cross the threshold. Gunther climbed onto the vanity, straddling the sink and ducking beneath the ceiling. Just inside the doorway, he pressed flat against the wall and waited.

“Mr. Manzetti? I know you’re back there. If you got a weapon, throw it on out now, and you follow next. You can save yourself a world of hurt that way. You hear me, Mr. Manzetti?”

The voice sounded brittle, the kid nothing but a bundle of nerves trying to convey authority. Ten to one he’d never done this outside of training simulations. Gunther imagined him in a Weaver stance, sweating every step, pistol leading the way in a two-handed grip as he pretended that Gunther was no worse than an automated plywood target that might pop up along a track.

“I already got your lady friend locked up tight. I don’t bat five hundred, Mr. Manzetti, I bat a thousand. Up to you, easy or hard.”

What Gunther couldn’t figure was why this tumbleweed was after them at all. He couldn’t fault Maddy; she looked to have played her part like a pro. Odder still, the deputy had called him by name, information he couldn’t have gotten from the Cadillac’s license plates. The registration wasn’t even under his own name.

Gunther let it go for now, quashing everything but instinct and awareness as the deputy took careful steps up the hall. He sensed a pause, then heard a sudden flurry as the deputy yanked open a closet door, found nothing, and continued.

Gunther held his breath. Stooped already, he reached down to grab the scummy bar of soap, rose again.

A tiny creak in the hall, four feet away. Three. Two. Gunther tossed the bar of soap across the bathroom and into the shower; it landed with a thud on molded plastic.

When Gunther saw the pistol and two forearms swing through the doorway, he kicked out from atop the vanity, knocking them against the bathroom door. He swooped down to club the deputy’s wrist with the towel bar, and the pistol went clattering to the linoleum.

The deputy’s babyface went raw with panic, and he fumbled at his Sam Browne belt — pepper spray, probably. Gunther tagged him across the chin with a hastily thrown elbow, doing little harm but spinning him as the kid rolled with the punch. From behind him, Gunther snapped the hand towel around his face and caught the free end, drew both taut, skinning the fabric tighter than a mask. Gunther could feel the hard shell of a Kevlar vest beneath the beige uniform shirt. He dragged the blind and struggling deputy into the bedroom, where he would have more elbow room.

Gunther kept up the pressure as he shifted both ends of the towel to one hand, then swung the aluminum bar, battering into the contoured terrycloth until it began to stain red, and the towel went heavy in his hand.

Gunther laid the deputy on the floor, the towel stuck onto his face, and cuffed his wrists behind his back with a second pair looping off his belt. He whipped the bloodied towel into a thick gag and tied it in place; ripped the beige uniform shirt away and unfastened the vest and worked it off over the deputy’s head.

After snatching the handcuff key, he hurried outside to let Madeline out of the car and turn her loose before she blew up at anything in sight, him included. Too late. Her fuse was gone. He chilled her out with a no-nonsense, one-eyed glare, had her swing the Cadillac around the trailer. She parked beside the bedroom window, through which he chucked the deputy so they could load him into the trunk, out of sight from the distant neighbors.

“Get those comic books out of there first,” he told Madeline. “I don’t want him bleeding on the box. Put his shirt under his head.”

Gunther made a quick pass through the trailer, using his own shirt to wipe down whatever he’d touched. Not that it was likely to make much difference, but still, there was principle involved. No sense making it any easier to tie him here than it had to be.